


Fuel to Blue Flame

by alliedwolves



Series: The Starlight Theatre Presents: [2]
Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hive Mind, Mickey is Hot Chocolate Boy, Mind Control, Vi is the hoodie wearing Lauren who dances with him in La Dee Dah Dah Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-16 11:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19317319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alliedwolves/pseuds/alliedwolves
Summary: Hot Chocolate Boy had a not-date, and now has an idea that might just stop whatever this blue shit is from getting him all the way. Whatever this alien virus-like thing is, he doesn't want any.





	1. The Old Starlight theatre

**Author's Note:**

> (( Science and science notes supplied by Spec, at spectralan0maly.tumblr.com, who does excellent art and headcanons for TGWDLM ))

 

“It’s like you live in that coffee place. What gives?” 

Vi did the work they were meant to, and usually not any more. “Work-life balance” his left kidney, she just liked conversation and food. 

“They do the biggest muffins. Good value.” 

Vi scowled, whacking his shoulder gently. 

“You and value, man. They taste like sweet sawdust and their coffee is worse. The danishes are okay at least.” 

“Did you come all this way to insult me?” 

He was joking, mostly. They shared an open-plan office, like all the grads, and even though it was a dingy little cave built in 1978, it was  _ theirs,  _ and the students made it feel so, with little neighbourhoods and street signs and everything. Frivolous nonsense. He’d made sure he was on New Life Lane, right down in its dead-end cul-de-sac. Maybe he did need a break, considering how crabby he’d been lately.

Vi, as ever, was on the same wavelength. “I will suffer their coffee and buy you a drink. And afterwards you can some see a show with me.” 

He baulked. “What?” 

Vi shuddered as she spoke: “It’s like you live in 4 places. The lab, the kitchenette attached to the lab, Beanie’s, and I assume you go home to sleep. You’d fucking better. You have the sense of work-life balance of a kid’s movie dad, I fucking swear.” 

He ceded the point, finishing off his spreadsheet and turning his monitor off. “They don’t have a washing machine, and it’s too cold. To sleep here, I mean.” 

Vi laughed, and he did too, after a moment. 

“Of course you’d have tried. Listen, my brother flaked on me, and I have 2 tickets to  _ Mamma Mia,  _ and  _ you  _ know it’s not a date. I’ll suffer, you’ll suffer, it’ll be just like here. Except outside and with different shitty coffee. Please, Mickey?”

He straightened his glasses, before reaching down to move his messenger bag from his footwell to his desk.. He stood and stretched, wincing when his joints clicked back into place. Okay she definitely had a point. She grinned up at him, messy hair kept tentatively back out of the way by hair bobbles straining against her curly hair. He frowned, looking down at his shirt, suspenders, and bowtie with consternation. Her hoodie and legwarmers were hardly any better, either. 

“We’re not dressed for the theatre.” 

“C’mon, we’ll make up for being underdressed by being overeducated, it’ll be fine.” 

Not one to let his resolve fade over clothes of all things, he set his computer to run a simulation overnight, the neon green nanobots waltzing through clear blood, correctly identifying and destroying the pink and red pathogens. Simulations were looking good. He snapped out of his reverie, snatched up his bag, and left. 

* * *

Beanies was fine. Slow, but fine. Vi giggled when they gave him a voucher, snatching it up to look at it.

“What, they think their best customer isn’t coming back? How much is this even for?” 

“I think it’s 2 hot chocolates, that’s what they did the last time this occurred.” 

He was right, was the funny thing, and she handed it back like he’d won a prize. He accepted just as formally, but as a joke, like he had indeed won a prize. She laughed, swatting his arm, and he smiled. She understood his humour, and that was the third best thing about this job, behind having one, and working on something to potentially cure diabetes– and diabetes only to start! –if they could get it to work. 

That was worth occasionally doing outside things with her, for sure. They rocked up half an hour early, even, despite the delay on his chocolate, and ate pizza in the park opposite. 

As idyllic as it all was, something had to go wrong. That was the rules. There was a loud splintering sound, and then an eerie and too-full silence. Vi met his eyes, jerking her head towards the theatre. Towards where the sound had come from. 

Silently, they scarfed their pizza as quickly as they could. Mickey might not know what they were seeing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want it to go ahead. 

The Starlight theatre was still standing, the rhinestone in the crown of downtown Hatchetfield. At first he’d thought it was some kind of Globe Theatre situation, that some kind of prop thing had broken and taken the stage down with it. 

“Do you think this is a ‘the show must go on’ kind of situation?” Mickey said, not even sure himself if he was joking. He just. He needed to break the awful, too-loud silence. There was a cop car in the parking lot, at least, so maybe this was some kind of handled, but the siren was silent and the cop nowhere to be seen. A girl he’d seen at Beanie’s was craning her neck to look through a nearby window, but there weren’t too many people around, to be honest. 

The silence was broken by the dramatic slamming back of the front doors. Everyone jumped. 

“ATTENTION~” 

The Beanie’s girl yelped “ _ Fuck you, Sam!”  _ as a large man stomped forward, smile oddly serene, the double doors slamming once more as they settled behind him. His eyes were covered in dark, polarised sunglasses, flashing the blue light of the  _ Starlight Theatre _ sign back at the people milling around the car-park. Barely contained within his hat was a great shock of brown curly hair. He grinned, electrically brightly, feeling to Mickey like he was looking straight at him. 

“There will be no  _ Mamma-a Mia  _ performance   
But thank you you’ve been the greatest audI-ence,” 

Mickey frowned. The guy had a weird cadance, like an old Neil Cicerega song, and it was like his grin was stapled to his face. 

It was probably nothing. 

Rather than following the girl who was storming through the doors to ask about ticket reimbursement or trade ins, Sam the cop sidled up to him and Vi. Vi stood behind him, taking advantage of his height, and Mickey didn’t blame her. He wished he could do the same, honestly. Sam put his hand out, weirdly theatrical. 

“What’d you see, son?” 

“Excuse me?” Mickey asked, taking a step back. Vi kept pace, but sadly, so did Sam. 

“Tell me what did you see and observe   
The chain of events, Son,” 

Sam loomed. Mickey was looking at those sunglasses, behind which he could not make out Sam’s eyes, and he started to breathe consciously. In, and out, and out of sync with the weird… patter this guy was putting on. 

“We were in the park, we didn’t see anything. There was a weird bang, and then, nothing.” 

Vi was great. The evening hadn’t been, but Mickey was going to have to go on another not-a-date in gratitude, at this rate. Sam’s hand rose up sharply, readying itself to be shaken. 

“Thank you for your report, kids. I’ll let you know about the tickets. Run along.” 

Mickey was twenty seven but he had a way out, and he was going to take it. Vi was making exaggerated gross out noises behind him though, so that helped. He shook the proffered hand, not thinking about germs, not at  _ all  _ thinking about germs, and got out his hand sanitiser in a practiced movement as he and Vi walked off. 

“Gross.” 

“You are correct, Vi, that was gross and  _ unsettling.  _ And worst of all, clammy. _ ” _

His voice picked up into a whine as it did when he was distressed. Immediately, he wiped down his hands without looking down. He knew biting his nails wasn’t the safest stim he had, given his lab work, but using alcohol that stung at the cuts was both preventative and punishment. He shoved his little kit of sanitiser and handkerchief into his pocket. 

“Let’s stop by the lab on the way home. Get some work done. I will buy you an icecream on the way there, it might be almost as entertaining as whatever we were going to see would have been.” 

Vi looked as relieved as he felt, to remain with a friend for a while. “Sure,” she said, scratching the back of her neck. “I’m still going to hold you to seeing the next musical that comes, though.” 

“It’s a deal,” he said, shoving his hands and their stinging nailbeds into his pockets. Right next to his sanitation kit, with its white handkerchief and bottle of alcohol. 

His white handkerchief, he would discover, with its bright blue stain. 

* * *

 

He hadn’t looked. Hadn’t even thought to, even though the cop was clammy and gross. Unseen until he reached the lab, a wet wipe covered in blue exudate was shoved into a sample bag. He looked over at the bag and shuddered. If only he knew how to most safely destroy it. 

It just kept glowing, and dividing, faster than anything he’d ever seen before. If not for their analysis, he’d fear some grey-goo scenario, everything converted into blue slime. But no. It needed hosts, and it wanted them with consciousness, and regardless of how safe or unsafe they had been in non-lab conditions, it lived and spread through both himself and Vi. He put aside the vial of nano-bots and their 3D printed administration device, and tried to stay calm, despite the positive and negative excitement growing inside him. 

Maybe the nanobots would do exactly what they had in most simulations: destroy invasive and deleterious tissue. He nodded tightly to Vi, giving her a thumbs up when he realised their containment suits weren’t going to let such a gesture be seen. She nodded, brow furrowed tightly. 

He continued his notes from inside his containment suit of paper coveralls, face mask, and nitrile gloves. Vi rested her gloved hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. 

_ Under any other circumstance, it is preferred to write the background, hypotheses, and methods prior to conducting experiments.  It is preferred to be thorough, precise. To have something to cross reference when conducting the experiments. But tonight, this is not a luxury that can be afforded. I wish there was more time.  _

He had to accept it, was the worst thing. He could feel it, psychosomatic or not, crawling beneath his skin, leaching from his fingernails to his wrists, and even further...

_ I have been exposed to an extra-terrestrial pathogen. So has Vi. There's no telling what it will do to us, but one can infer that the human body's natural defenses will have no way of stopping it. As a result, it was decided that I become the subject of a new experiment. (To be blunt, we drew straws and I had the longest.)  _

_ Developments have been made in Nanotechnology, intended to be injected into an organism's blood stream with the intent to aid in maintaining homeostasis. In the lab, these cell-sized synthetic organisms have been proven to have the ability to restore damaged tissues to full, proper functionality and destroy harmful pathenogenic viral infections, bacteria and eukarya. While this was intended to aid those with diseases that involve either a pathogen to be destroyed or a tissue in need of restoration, the military took interest in this research.  _

Not that he’d heard a peep out of them about it. He scowled. The least they could do would be to share their papers for peer review. 

_ They have no doubt implemented it far faster than clinical trial would have allowed, preferring high stakes trial and error with the loss of a few lives to a slow, steady, and safer pace. That being said, there is no official documentation of these machines being used on humans that can be freely accessed. This experiment will be the first of its kind outside of the military's possible implementation. _

_ The alien pathogen seems to operate similar to a virus in some ways. Samples of the subject's infected tissue were taken for inspection and DNA sequencing, into to find that the genome was entirely replaced, the resulting cell similar to the original host cell, but utilizing alternate nucleotides to construct the genetic material.  _

_ Given what is known about the pathogen and the capabilities of the Nano technology, it was decided that nanobots be introduced into the subject's body. This was done with the primary hypothesis in mind that the machines would destroy the viral spores and restore the transformed cells and tissues to their former selves, effectively stopping the spread of the pathogen. _

_ A null hypothesis must be kept in mind, despite the primary always being the favorite child in the experiment. All possibilities should be noted. It is possible that, upon introduction of the nanobots into the subject's blood stream, the bots will not stop or slow the spread of the pathogen, and the alien virus will effectively replace all tissues within the subjects body. _

_ Observations will be made on the subject’s vitals and behavior in regular intervals. _

It was going to be a  _ very  _ long night. 

 


	2. A Full Dance Card

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Apotheosis is upon Mickey. Vi takes a little longer. But they don’t have all La Dee Dah Dah Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4FYNF02yEM Is the inspiration for the "Cups" Tap dance performed by Mickey

_ It has been 3 hours since presumed infection, and an hour since Mickey administered the nano bots. His pulse has remained steady. His motor functions remain stable. Both of us are experiencing something akin to tinnitus. I’m not any closer to figuring out what the blue goop is doing to us, and he doesn’t know either, he says. We are both keeping separate notes. His are almost certainly more clinical than mine: I’m not going to spend my last moments being “assiduous in my studies for posterity” I’m going to spend them doing the best I can for my best friend and for myself.  _

Mickey’s blood is… weird. At the moment, she can’t really tell what’s up with it: Nanobots and goop-cells are definitely fighting. Her blood was no clearer: no nanobots, and less goop, was all she could really tell. 

Mickey was curled up in his typical office posture, a question mark of determined poise. He was scribbling away, his toes tapping  rhythmically–

She whipped around to face him, ancient swivel chair protesting the sudden movement, and her hair falling into her face. 

“You’re keeping time?” She demanded to know.

“What?” Mickey said, straightening up with a series of audible clicks. To Vi’s panicked ears, they too fell in line with the music she could hear now the toe tapping had stopped. 

“You were keeping a rhythm going, and you’ve never fucking done that, it drives me up the wall. Try it again!” she asked, and Mickey obliged. His brown loafer tapped, and she knew it to be in– 

“⅞ time!” They said in unison, both of them flinching back to hear it confirmed. 

“I have never been able to so much as whistle, this is highly irregular,” Mickey said, his fingers tapping a tattoo on the desk. He looked down, frowned, and held them with his hand. The foot tapping resumed. ⅞ time, once again. He frowned down at his feet, before pointing towards her with a yelp.

“Look!”

She looked down. Her pen was tapping in the same time signature.

* * *

 

_ I think it communicates through… music? And the tinnitus we’ve been having is a part of that. I suppose music  _ is  _ a form of mathematics, and that  _ is  _ what we chose to send on  _ Voyager  _ but this still seems like a striking surprise. I wonder if it means anything that music is something humans and some animals enjoy and understand. Something something, stardate something, it’s getting hard to concentrate with all this music going on. I can hear it, distantly, and Mickey says it has snuck up on him and sounds perhaps two rooms away.  _

“Can you change time?” She asked, suddenly bored with her note taking. Mickey smiled at her, stretching out of his curve once more and scratching the back of his neck, uncharacteristically at ease. Perhaps his anxiety wasn’t able to come up with a worse case scenario given how fucked they were already. 

“How about I change up the tune instead?” He said, leaving aside the notes he was making and standing up. She gasped. His shoulders were straight, but not tense, and his fists loosely hung from his sides. At least his glasses were still crooked, or there’s be nothing of the posture she knew of his. He frowned at her, confused, before starting to hum. 

She didn’t know how she knew this, but it was a different time signature to the song in her head, so she supposed it didn’t mean too much. Thinking of music…

She ran to the little kitchenette, coming back to their isolation room with one of Anushka’s plastic cups. If Mickey could have rhythm, maybe she could have this. She’d have to take the hazmat suit off, but that didn’t seem like a problem right now. It didn’t to Mickey either, if the way he nearly ripped his off was any hint. 

He watched, curious, as Vi started tapping out a rhythm with the cup and her hands, perfectly executing the flips, her voice a smooth contralto she’d never managed before. It was absorbing. The music was straightforward and easy to follow, and she sang and tapped and clapped in time to the “When I’m Gone” song that’d been popular a while back. This was. This was pretty cool, actually.

“Are you going to include this in your write up, Vi?” He said pointedly in the way he had. She grinned. 

“Listen, when life gives you lemons, or blue raspberries, I guess, you make lemonade, all right? I’ve always wanted to be able to do this.” 

Clack clack, tappa tap, lift slap slide. 

Clack clack, tappa tap, lift slap slide. 

“I’ve bought a ticket for the long way round~” 

After a moment, he began to harmonise with her. She couldn’t make out the lyrics he started singing, timed well and yet faster than the cup song, but they sounded as forlorn as the song itself, sounded like they belonged. Belonging there in the music was good. She missed it when he stopped, was the thing. She went through the whole song, and perhaps it was just her excitement, but she seemed pretty able to keep on pitch, even. Oh man, her brother would flip over this, he loved those  _ Pitch Perfect _ movies. 

She looked up, and Mickey had stopped watching, and was doing–was that tap? Tap dancing, keeping in time with the cup song she was no longer performing. He looked at ease, and it just kept on going, perfect tap  manoeuvre  after perfectly choreographed manoeuvre. Worse, when he stopped, moving from one piece to the next and starting up a rendition of “Want you gone,” she couldn’t hear the tapping anymore. His brown loafers slid over the laminate with nary a tap. She shuddered. Something was  _ definitely  _ amiss, and she was going to get to the bottom of it. She wanted Mickey to make sense again. 

“Looks like we’re both having fun,” she said, and Mickey grinned, and spun over and hugged her. For longer than a second, even. She pulled back, and the hug stopped. 

“Wh–you don’t like being touched! Not for more than a passing fucking moment, Mickey, what the fuck–” Vi took another step back, the swivel chair between them both now. 

“It’s… it’s like the singing, or the dancing. It feels right like it never did. I am simply making,” He grinned, and it was definitely her imagination that his eyes lit up a darker blue. “I’m simply making blue raspberry lemonade.” 

That wasn’t unreasonable, was the thing. Now the startlement was over it was pretty sweet, actually. They’d poked and punched each other, rested heads against each other momentarily, but limits and boundaries were limits and boundaries, no matter what feelings one had about it. She sighed out a shakey breath and took a step forward, arms outstretched. He rested his over hers, chin resting on her head and pushing a bobble into her scalp. This was kind of pleasant, like the cup song: a light in a scary fucking night, but still. It didn’t right with her. Especially not with his foot tapping on the floor, the distant music growing closer. 

They only parted when the alarm went off. “Blood tests! Time for blood tests,” Vi said, and Mickey nodded, walking over with her to where they’d been sitting to take them. Once they were done, he went back to his dancing, stiffness transformed into a rigid kind of grace. She shuddered. 

_ He has started humming, and it didn’t to start with, but now the music in his mouth sounds like the music I hear in my head. I do not think this is good. While Mickey insists this is fine, I am going to make my stance here in these notes, I would go so far as to say, “This is bad, this is so fucking bad, you guys.” And record it here for posterity.  _

_ His blood is… It looks incredibly different to mine at this point. I’m not sure why: maybe the nanobots are speeding it up rather than destroying the virus. I don’t need a microscope to know that. My blood is red, his is purple. A kindergartener could manage it.  _

_ He’s– he’s staring at the door. It sounds like he’s talking to someone, even though there’s no one else here.  _

“Sam will be here soon.” Mickey’s speaking voice cut through her note taking. 

“Who?” She asked, thinking through the students she knew. She didn’t think any of them were named Sam. They  _ were  _ going to have to tell people not to come into the lab soon, even if she found herself strangely reluctant to do so. 

“The cop we met. His apotheosis is fully upon him.” 

Apotheosis. Transcendence. She wrinkled her nose at it. “I thought you were an atheist.” 

“It doesn’t matter what we were.” He said, eyes alight with fervour. He resumed his dance, once more keeping time with the music they both heard. He danced his way to the desk, tinkering with the applicator he'd used for the nanobots and Jan's emergency inhaler with a mechanical precision of movement. He was utterly engrossed, save those moments his head cocked to one side for a bar or so, humming. 

She didn’t interrupt him, even once the next hour had passed and it was time to take their next blood test. She didn’t dare. She took her own, instead. She returned to her notes, heart humming fast in her chest. 

_ My blood is purple too. I have a pistol in my bag, and it’s not– I don’t want this. But I think Mickey’s completely gone and I don’t think I’ll be able to resist this music, the apotheosis, much longer.  _

She turned away, pulling the pistol from her bag, ignoring the sounds of Mickey getting up. She had to do this, she had to save her best friend and herself from whatever it was they were becoming. 

She turned, the gun in her hand, and Mickey was running at her. 

She shrieked on the way down as he pushed her out of the chair, flipping off the safety and shooting in a blind panic. 

The stain on his shirt was a bright blue. He crumpled over the chair after a long moment, and she stared at the body of her best friend, gun falling from her hand. 

Oh, no. He looked ungainly in death like he had been before the goop stuff had changed him. 

She had to follow– had to make it quick. She reached for the gun, and screamed when Mickey’s hand grabbed her wrist halfway to the ground. Quicker than blinking, he brought the applicator down on the back of her hand, right into the vein network. Tossing it, he grabbed for her. 

She shoved him, grabbing at his arm as she tried to wrench herself free, but Mickey unwound himself, glasses askew as he dragged himself up, one hand tight around her neck. She grabbed his arm with her free hand, trying to grab enough air to think. She couldn’t stop his other arm from grabbing a handful of her hair, wrenching her head back. Spots danced before her eyes. The music was getting louder. As she gasped, the inhaler hidden in Mickey’s hand came up to meet her open mouth, and she choked as she took in bright blue poison. She could feel her apotheosis set in as she started to watch herself through Mickey’s, through the Hive’s, eyes. 

Her heart skipped a beat, then stopped entirely.

* * *

 

Vi came to consciousness and apotheosis to find Mickey’s arm beneath her shoulder, and her hand in his. She found her feet, and his arm slid down her back. She rested her free hand on her shoulder, her tinnitus fully resolved into the everpresent music of the hive. They skirted expertly around the chair, acting as a unit. Harmonious in song, dance, and purpose, they waltzed to the kitchenette, spinning out to separate and place blue shit in the water cooler, and the brewing, freshly poisoned coffee. Zoey showed them how she’d done it. Sam laughed, and would be doing the same thing down at the station when he had the chance. 

The PhD students would soon be their fellows again. Once the biology lab was set up to ensure the apotheosis, they stepped back together once more, waltzing out to find the next number on their dance card. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The song Sam is speaking in time to is One Weird Tip by Lemon Demon


End file.
